Walk It Off
by Nothing Short of Pride
Summary: Sadstuck. In which an alternate Bro finds a doomed Dave. Warning for character death?


The air tasted different here. Perhaps it was just years of living off inner city smog, but something about the air here just felt alien. It seemed to be pouring itself into his lungs every time he inhaled, filling his mouth and nose with the smell of smoke and sulfur. And sweat. How could he forget sweat?

Bro had no idea where he was. He did not understand what had just happened, but even now his face was blank as a sheet of paper and his every motion had the same measured nonchalance as when he walked down the sidewalk outside their apartment. Of course, balancing on railings and rooftop ledges wasn't quite the same as balancing on steel framework above boiling magma, but he supposed the same principle applied: don't fall.

The last thing Bro could recall was diving after his little brother, surrounded by falling chunks of flaming rock. The heat of his location had actually lead him to believe that he had merely been knocked unconscious and was still cursed to waiting for a slow death by meteor shower. Frankly he was a bit surprised to find himself alive.

The more pressing question was if he could say the same for Dave. He'd been wandering the new location for what may as well have been hours. The sky remained the same dull black as when he'd first awoken, and seemed intent on staying that way without even hinting at a coming dawn. It was enough to make Bro wonder just how long he'd been out.

He'd been somewhat relieved to find he still had his katana, and of course his buddy Cal, even if the two made travel a pain in the ass. Whoever had built this place hadn't really kept pedestrians in mind and there was nothing by way of street or walkway. Luckily this posed little trouble for Bro. It was as he leapt down from one steel crossbeam to another that he caught a glimpse of Dave. He had to blink sweat from his eyes just to keep him in sight, but it was unmistakably his younger brother.

Bro kept his eyes trained on the boy as he slid forward, sneakers squeaking over sooty metal as he made his way towards the figure. In the gloom of the current atmosphere, Dave's pale hair almost seemed to glow by contrast, like a halo around his head, and the red glow from the lava below lent an eerie light to the slight frame. As he crossed to the structure below Dave, Bro was suddenly aware of a sound that had somehow slipped his attention before.

From all directions came the sound of ticking. Well, he'd certainly seen a fair share of clocks so far, and even more gears, but he could have sworn that they all ran with a greased and silent smoothness. Turning his eyes to his footing, Bro did not see Dave sit down, merely heard the heavy sigh and rustle as he did so. Bro gave no indication to his presence as he drew up almost directly beneath him; he never did. That would defeat the purpose of sneaking after all. He could hear Dave swear softly above him.

Something warm and wet his arm, causing Bro's gaze to snap up.

If it had been anyone besides Bro, Dave would have been nothing but a seared sack of young boy, sinking into the magma below. However, the older Strider was nothing if not fast, and as the figure dropped limply from his perch, his arms shot out. His sword clattered as it fell, and the puppet dangled next to it, both abandoned from where he'd let them tumble from his grasp.

He grunted at the sudden acquisition of all of Dave's weight, sitting down heavily himself as he hauled the boy up onto the bar beside him. The steel was not even wide enough to lie down on, and Bro had to prop the boy up against him just to keep them balanced. He was hit by a metallic smell before he cared to look down.

Bro was not sure how he'd missed the dark, matted places in Dave's hair while approaching him, but they certainly stood out now. One of the boy's arms seemed to have been mangled by something with a lot of teeth, and his shitty sword was, unsurprisingly, nowhere to be seen. A lens had been popped from his shades, and the other was cracked. But worse, something had raked claws across his chest, leaving his t-shirt in tatters, the remaining material managing to conceal just how bad the damage was.

And the blood. Everything was soaked, it seemed. It streamed down his arm, to drip off his fingertips. It congealed in his hair, and trickled down his forehead and neck. It oozed and pooled in cavities on his chest that should not have been there. Already, Bro's hands were slick, and his clothing dampened.

"Shit," Hissed from between clenched teeth, it was hardly a dignified response. Bro swallowed, brain not seeming to process situation at hand and allowing his mouth to make a pathetically witty comment. "What, did you get mauled by a lion or something, kid?"

To his relief, the comment was enough to make a barely conscious Dave's eyes flicker open.

"Damn underlings," It was a croak, but it was still words. His breathing seemed too loud, too labored and Bro's mind could not seem to grasp why.

"Underlings, huh?" His mouth seemed too dry. He could feel his cool slipping ever so slightly. "Come on; I expected more from you."

"Hn," Was all Dave seemed to be able to muster, closing his eyes again, apathetic to Bro's apparent disappointment in him. The skin of his eyelid seemed thin and achingly dark, especially with his eye twitching so close under the skin. His entire body seemed to convulse in time to the twitching of his eye, which in turn seemed to be twitching in time to the ticking. That goddamn ticking, was going to drive him mad.

"Come on, little dude, walk it off," Even as he spoke the words, they seemed to echo discordantly in his mouth. "Just shrug it off,"

He'd always said this to Dave, ever since they first starting strifing. Sure, he went easy on him a little – no sense in killing his own brother – but not that easy. What good was training if you were still soft as a pansy? And they'd always been taught to be stronger than that. You're not a fucking pansy; you don't get your ass whopped, you whop ass. They'd sustained plenty of injuries before, and this had always worked. Just walk it off. Just shrug it off. It's no biggie. It's nothing. It always worked.

"Come on," He wasn't exactly sure what he was expecting at this point. "Just walk it off…"

Dave let his head roll back to stare up at him. His eyes had always been a source of embarrassment for Dave among other children. Even if he'd never complained of bullies or any such torment (Striders didn't GET bullied), Bro knew. They were glassy, half lidded now, somehow staring through him in a way that sent chills down his spine and turned the sweat on his burning skin ice cold.

"Dave," He rarely called Dave by his name. It was always "little dude", or "man", or "bro" - always cool, always distant. He could feel Dave's eyes staring straight at him without seeing him. The boy's lips trembled, and for the life of him Bro could not tell if he were trying to speak or if he was just scared. He felt small fingers curl against the leg of his pants, searching for purchase, and somehow his hand thought it fit to offer it.

When Dave was small – too small to know that Striders were too cool to get scared – he'd been plagued with nightmares. There had only been a small period of respite where Bro could sleep through whole nights between the time Dave stopped needing to be fed every two hours as a baby and the time he was old enough to climb out of bed and into Bro's. Bro didn't cuddle. It was yet another thing Striders just didn't do. However he would roll over when he heard the sound of small feet tapping quietly across the floor, and make room in his bed. He would feel tiny hands reaching for him in the dark, and while he would never dare cuddle the child, he could at least offer him a hand to hold on to.

As soon as he could coax words from the boy, he'd been able to learn that the nightmares mostly revolved around puppets. This would, of course, be a problem, considering Bro's livelihood, and he'd introduced Cal to him formally in hopes of offering him some positive puppet experience. Because isn't that what every child needs?

"Dave," Everything felt wrong. The hand he held was trembling. No, not trembling, twitching. His ears were filled with an inexplicable roaring; eyes painfully dry as he stared wildly down at his brother. And then there was silence. Oppressive, pressing down on him from all sides, threatening to choke whatever life was left from Bro's lungs. There was no breath, no noise, no whisper, no ticking; nothing but the mantra of Dave's name said over and over from dry lips as if it were a prayer and Bro realized that he was the one squeezing Dave's hand, not the other way around, and it hit him. It hit him like a truck, like a pound of bricks, like the entire god forsaken world, that he was cradling the body of the boy who had once been his brother.

Everything was hot. Everything was red: red magma shedding red light on red black pools of blood that drenched everything in its metallic red smell and stained everything with its fatal red and indisputable implications: red trickling from the corner of a slack mouth and glassy red eyes staring and staring without ever seeing him.

If he had been crying, he felt no tears. If he had been screaming, he heard no sound. He did not smell anything but sulfur, and copper, and smoke, or feel anything but the all-consuming heat. He was unaware of the passage of time. The only real things now were the frigidity in his arms and the heat surrounding him and the suffocating silence.

"Fuck," The voice was too familiar, too commonplace for Bro to react to it. "Shit, Bro…"

"You were never supposed to see this." Slowly, he turned his head, and nearly had his whole world cleaved apart again.

He stood there, almost sheepishly, scratching the back of his neck. Unscathed, Dave stood in front of him, the irony of wearing a long sleeved shirt in this heat lost to Bro for once. In contrast with the surrounding darkness, his pale hair almost glowed. Bro's head whipped back to the Dave he held. No, he was definitely still… Bro could not bring himself to even think "dead". Dying was just something Striders didn't do.

"What," Another completely clever response on his part. His voice sounded hollow, broken even to his own ears.

"That isn't me." The Dave in long sleeves jerked a thumb at the body. "Well, he might have been. Once."

Dave – Alpha Dave – proceeds to cleave Bro's perception of the world in two, and this time Bro didn't fight it. It was so much easier, somehow, to accept concepts such as time travel, and games that created and destroyed universes, and denizens, than to accept that Dave had died. And yet, no matter how Dave tried to convince him otherwise, Bro could not erase or overwrite what had just happened.

"I told you," Dave was exasperated, finally starting to sweat as he paced in front of his brother. The body had been reluctantly set aside. "It. Wasn't. Me."

"It WAS you," Bro growled, only earning him another irritated sigh. "Maybe not YOU," Bro jabbed a finger at Dave's living, breathing chest. "But he was a Dave."

"A _doomed_ Dave," Dave brushed his hand away, face threatening to loose its apathetic mask and fall into a scowl.

"My brother." Bro grabbed Dave's shoulders roughly, shaking him, his ears filled with the sound of ticking. "Somewhere, you just died in my arms."

Red hand prints remained on Dave's shoulders, even after Bro released him.


End file.
